Okay, we all know that junk email is a problem. But today, within the space of about 15 minutes, three things happened, and they illustrate a problem… A Facebook friend has apparently picked up Koobface, the Facebook virus whose least-troublesome symptom is spamming all your friends with posts (which link to the virus file — [...]

I’ve had a few projects recently where an existing site need a lot of help in a lot of areas: poorly organized, ineffective design, hardware or programming problems, inconsistent integration of various services, etc. Problem is, design is visual, and clients get that. So they know they want a new design. The other things are [...]

From the Incompatible Marketing Rules department: a) generate buyer excitement and b) tell the truth. Case in point: a few weeks ago, I signed up for a MagicJack free trial. On their (very aggressive) web site, it listed that the free trial was about to end — in fact, I noted that I had arrived [...]

Earlier this morning, my Web sites went black. No Web site, no email, no back-end access. Turns out, my hosting provider claims I violated their terms of service. Rather than contacting me to resolve the issue, they yanked the account without warning. All my sites disappeared in one fell swoop. What did I do to [...]

I’ve long been amused by the marketing of country top-level domains for other purposes — recently, I saw an ad for domains using the .me extension (Actual ad slogan: “It’s all about .me”). Pretty funny, if you know what’s really going on. Turns out, it’s not about me. It’s about Montenegro. Here’s the deal: In [...]

I’ve got Olympic spirit, yes I do. But when I wanted to watch some online video a few days ago, the NBC Olympics Web site told me I needed to install Silverlight (a Flash-like multimedia player from Microsoft). Weird, thinks I, ’cause I’m pretty sure I’ve already got Silverlight installed. But I clicked the link [...]

I often advise my clients who have e-commerce operations to buy from themselves, and then try to return their order — it’s a visceral way to find out how bad (or good) their own customer service is. As I write this, I’m on hold with Adobe Customer Service, waiting for a manager to get online. [...]

People seem to expect Internet content and services to be free. We happily use the Internet to pay for tangible goods, such as a DVD or flowers, but if the thing we want is a service or information, we’re unwilling to pay. So we walk to the store to buy the newspaper, but if we [...]

Dear Web Site Managers at Pepsi: after 30 seconds on a high-speed DSL connection, this is what I see. Pathetic. (This is for the Old School or New School promotion. Basically, I just chugged a Mountain Dew and now I want to find out if I won something cool. But I can’t… because… the… dang… [...]

In a social networking world, where your presence on MySpace and Facebook is almost as important as your own Web site, any redesign project needs to think outside the box. Granted, offsite factors have always been part of the business marketing mix. In case you can’t afford a few Super Bowl ads, online advertising and [...]